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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30127734">skaiagirlsgames.com</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ntmz/pseuds/ntmz'>ntmz</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 11:47:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,924</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30127734</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ntmz/pseuds/ntmz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Lalonde, 13 years old, plays dressup games online and perhaps makes a new friend.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. 2005-2009</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rose made the account when she was young. </p><p>Much to the chagrin of amateur psychoanalysts everywhere (in particular, the one residing in her own mind), her reasons were mundane. No dreams, no fathers, no repressed sexualities had led her to the website. She had simply been sad. Her favorite white shirt had been stained with a glug of Merlot (three guesses as to the culprit). No dry cleaner had been able to remove the stain, and Rose’s mom had sent the shirt to at least 10 dry cleaners.</p><p>When it became clear (for the 10th time) that the shirt was beyond saving, her mother gave her a gift. As Rose opened the package, she felt the stirrings of joy—it was a white shirt! By the time she had unfolded the shirt, her mood turned sour. It was a shirt with a shitty wizard on it. And it was shitty, like a low-resolution wizard from Google Images shitty. There were jpeg artifacts printed on the shirt, damn it!</p><p>So, in a habit that she retained to this day, the 9-year-old Rose found solace on the internet. She searched for dress-up games and soon found herself choosing the most eldritch options possible on what was intended to be a cute fairy doll game. The options were, as we all might imagine, somewhat lacking: too many wings, not enough tentacles. Rose grew bored, but she also forgot her sadness. She browsed the site some more, and found a few steampunk vampire games that were much more to her taste. A pop-up informed her that she could save her favorite games by making an account on the website, and so she did.</p><p>Once <span class="rose">tentacleTherapist</span> had made her debut on skaiagirlsgames.com, another pop-up gave her the option of creating a personal avatar, for whom one could buy clothes. The boondollars with which these clothes could be purchased were acquired by playing the games on the website. All in all, not a bad business plan for ad revenue.</p><p>She used the site for a month, and then promptly forgot about it. </p><p>Then she remembered it again when she was 13. Again, the intrepid psychoanalyst will be let down by her reasoning. She was beginning to be plagued by that pesky adolescent insecurity over her body. Had it been the insecurity of anybody else, Rose would have attempted to mine its depths with her best psychobabble. But because it was her own self, she could not dwell upon it for too long. Looking at her real-life wardrobe made her feel anxious. She tried not to think about it. As always, the internet was there to welcome her with open arms and to indulge her fantasies of being an alluring gothic lady.</p><p>First, she had to go through the "Forgot password?" stage that one always has to go through when trying to access an old account. Once that was done and she was logged on, she noticed that things had changed a little. </p><p>The upper left corner of the site displayed a picture of her avatar and her current amount of boondollars. It also informed her that she was at Rung 1: <span class="pesterlog">Darning Dora.</span> Rose frowned, but decided to ignore that for the time being to deal with more pressing matters. Namely, the hideous face of her avatar. The default face of the avatar was semi-realistic, yet it had a cartoonishly wide smile. Five years ago, she hadn't seen any need to change it. Clearly, past Rose had been a bit of a fool. </p><p>She went to the avatar's customization page and began looking through the various mouth options. Many of them were ugly, indeed, it seemed as if whoever was designing them wanted them to look terrible. One mouth, with slightly parted lips, seemed promising, but when Rose clicked on it, and the picture of her avatar updated, she grimaced. The mouth was aligned incorrectly. It was sitting on the right side of the face. <em>What the fuck?</em> She moved her pointer over the preview picture to see if she could nudge the mouth to the center, but to no avail. It could only be moved up or down. </p><p>She eventually found a mouth that she tolerated and was aligned properly. It was close-lipped, stern but pretty. She changed the default salmon lipstick to a dark purple, and moved onto the eyes. These were...even worse than the mouths, if such a thing was possible. For the most part, they looked okay — but that was before clicking on them and seeing her avatar picture change. Some of the eyes had transparent sclera, despite appearing white in the list of options. <em>Who even designed this?</em> Rose wondered. Surely nobody would choose these options. She unhappily settled on one, changed the eye color to purple, and then started browsing through the hairstyles. </p><p>The website disappointed her yet again. Most of the decent-looking hairstyles were available only to people above Rung 4. She ended up choosing a hairstyle with two buns, not because she had any particular fondness for it, but because it was the only option currently available to her that also sat properly on her avatar's head.</p><p>What the hell was Rung 4 anyway? Rose went to investigate. If she went to her profile page and clicked on her current level, <span class="pesterlog">Darning Dora,</span> she could see the grayed-out steps of the fashionista echeladder that awaited her:</p><p class="pesterlog">Home Seamstress<br/>
Thrifty Fashionista<br/>
Little Black Dressmaker </p><p>Er, that one was rather ambiguous. Along with competent programmers, they lacked a racial sensitivity oversight committee, it seemed.</p><p class="pesterlog">Embroidery Aficionado<br/>
Easy Breezy Covergirl <br/>
Karlie Boss<br/>
Kitten-heeled Conqueror<br/>
Needle Mistress</p><p>Rose scrolled faster to see what awaited her at the end:</p><p class="pesterlog">Yamamoto’s Yarnspinner<br/>
Marie Antoinette’s Tailor<br/>
Catwalk Goddess<br/>
Azzedine Slayer<br/>
Kate Boss<br/>
Alexander Slay, Kween<br/>
Jean-Paul Godtier</p><p>Ok. They used a “Boss” pun at least twice, but she figured she could forgive that crime, because it was clear that the website’s wordsmith had more of a functioning brain than whoever was in charge of the avatar customization page.</p><p>That done, she clicked on her wardrobe to see what she had bought five years ago. Not much, apparently. Hmm. She went back to the echeladder page and clicked around until she saw that she needed 100 grist to reach <span class="pesterlog">Home Seamstress.</span> </p><p>“And how, o benevolent skaiagirlsgames.com, can such a thing be achieved?” Rose muttered to herself. The website explained: by interacting with the site's community in some way. This could involve sending another user a friend request, writing a blog post, or commenting on one of the games. There was a limit to how much grist you could get in one day, but for whatever reason, the page did not specify what that limit was.</p><p>Rose rolled her eyes. She had no plans of interacting with other people on this site. A brief glance at the comments of her favorite steampunk game made it clear that the other users were likely over-excited 10 year olds with a weak grasp on English. Her best option seemed to be the blog post.</p><p class="rose">The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.</p><p>There. Perfect. Copying and pasting a line from a Sylvia Plath poem took no effort (she had no plans of taking this site seriously as a blogging platform), and it could work as a way to find people on this site who were more sophisticated than...well, over-excited 10 year olds with a weak grasp of English. She got 2 boondollars and 2 grist from posting it. </p><p>A few weeks passed. Rose visited the site daily, and figured out that the daily grist limit was 25. She advanced to the 6th rung, <span class="pesterlog">Easy Breezy Covergirl</span>, and was disappointed (but not very surprised) by the fact that the newly unlocked hairstyles were not much better. She made a new post every day, mostly along the lines of <span class="rose">I have absolutely nothing of interest to say here but I need the grist.</span> Occasionally, she would quote a line or two from poems, still hoping that she would find someone of an intellectual persuasion on this site, but alas. </p><p>She did receive a few friend requests, and cautiously accepted them after screening their profiles for objectionable material. But these new "friends" didn't seem to have any interest in her. It was highly likely that they sent the requests to gain grist as well. Rose supposed that was reasonable, and decided to send out a few requests of her own to users whose outfits she liked. She was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the clothes and customization options and the games themselves. Her blog posts became somewhat more personal as she used them to channel her frustration.</p><p class="rose">I come here to indulge in silly dress-up games, but the selection of games on this site is pitiful. Yet I cannot bring myself to abandon this account. Every day, I find myself drawn to it, attempting to earn its fake money and grist so I can climb up all the levels.</p><p class="rose">I wonder if anyone besides me uses this pointless blog function. I've hit my grist quota for today, so writing this post will not even grant me any more of that elusive stuff. So, why am I here? I feel a compulsion from within that drives me to type these words in this box. Could it be that I genuinely wish to express myself on here, to pretend for a moment that this trivial website is a diary of mine?</p><p class="rose">In case you couldn't tell, the answer to the question in my last post was a resounding "no". I could have mentioned this within the post itself, but I wanted to wait 24 hours for my grist limit to refresh. Addiction is a powerful thing, etc.</p><p class="rose">Here I am, typing yet another set of words to be thrown out into the void. It would be nice if somebody was willing to snark with me about how stupid this website is.</p><p class="rose">Today I investigated the eyelashes available in the avatar customization pages. Did you know that none of the eyelashes properly line up with the avatar's eyes? Time and time again, I find myself wondering what fools are behind this website.</p><p class="rose">Let me elaborate upon my last post. I've now hypothesized that this seeming incompetency is a part of their business plan. Trying to make the avatar look halfway decent is an arduous task, so that when it is finally done, I feel such an overwhelming sense of satisfaction that it makes me forget, for a blissful few seconds, my intense dissatisfaction with everything else on this website. Thus soothed, I continue browsing through the games and the shops, which increases the amount of money that this site makes from advertisements. Ingenious, isn't it?</p><p>One day, she got a notification. Someone had commented on one of her blog posts. Oh, dear. Rose hoped it wasn't one of the people on her friend list, finally calling her out on her meanness in insulting the general level of intelligence on this site. </p><p class="kanaya">Hello </p><p class="kanaya">I Have Just Discovered Your Profile And Like Your Sense Of Style Quite A Bit</p><p class="kanaya">But More Importantly The Opinions Which You Have Expressed In Your Posts Are Ones With Which I Agree</p><p class="kanaya">I Did Not Know That Anyone Else On This Site Felt That Way</p><p>Rose read over the words a few times, and then clicked on the little avatar picture next to the comment and browsed through their outfits. Hm. Not really Rose's style, for the most part, but certainly pretty. She clicked on their blog. There was only one post.</p><p class="kanaya">Probably I Have No Right To Be Complaining Like This Since The Primary Attraction Of This Site For Me Happens To Be The Vampire Dressup Games<br/>
But Yesterday While Trying To Update My Avatar I Was So Frustrated I Wanted To Tear My Hair Out</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>the website is based on my experiences on i-dressup.com, which is now defunct. i somewhat sburb-ified it for funsies, hopefully i succeeded. let me know if i didn't ;)</p><p>some of the fashionista echeladder names are inspired by canon (e.g. ariadne's threadspinner is a canon godtier level for rose) but most are shitty puns, as rose notes</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. April 2009</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="rose">Hello, Ms. grimAuxiliatrix.<br/>
I hope “Ms.” is correct, by the way. Your profile has no gender listed, but your avatar appears to be that of a…<br/>
Suddenly, I am worried that I may be committing a faux pas.<br/>
In any case, it’s nice to see a fellow complainer around these parts. I also thought I was the only one.</p><p>A few days later, this showed up in her inbox.</p><p class="kanaya">Hello Again Ms Tentacletherapist<br/>
I Hope Ms Is Correct For You As It Is For Me Although I Fail To Understand Why We Are Corresponding As If We Are Business Partners<br/>
Actually It Is Somewhat Funny Considering The Digital Context In Which This Is Occurring<br/>
An Ill Designed Website Run By Humans Who Are Barely Amateurs At Coding<br/>
Not That I Am<br/>
Someone Who Knows How To Code<br/>
I Do Have A Friend Who Knows How To Code And I Have Sometimes Wondered If I Should Ask Him For Lessons But He Is<br/>
Not Sure How To Put It Politely<br/>
Somewhat Hard To Talk To<br/>
I Suppose This Could Be Said Of Most Of My Friends So It Is Not That I Am Complaining About Him In Particular<br/>
And He Has Never Done Me Any Harm So I Do Not Wish To Speak Ill Of Him<br/>
I Dont Know Why I Typed All Of That I Suppose I Should Apologize For Its Quality Of Having Too Much Information</p><p class="rose">I am delighted by the length of your message. Up until encountering you, I was half-convinced that everyone on this website was a bot; why else would they keep coming back to something so user unfriendly? I keep coming back, it’s true, but I also kvetch about it on here. Also, let me assure you now that I am not a bot, but a full flesh and blood human.</p><p class="kanaya">Attempting To Keep This Message Short To Make Up For The Previous One<br/>
I Assure You That I Am Also Not A Bot</p><p class="rose">Is it my turn to deliver a prolix response? Perhaps I will divulge something about my personal circle, since you mentioned a friend. Something salacious, even, to up the conversational ante.<br/>
One of my acquaintances has a guardian who…intrigues me greatly, shall we say. As far as I can tell, he makes a living by filming and uploading videos of a pornographic nature onto his website. The stars of the videos are not flesh and blood humans, but puppets, in possession of colorful plush rumps and magnificently curving proboscises. The viewers of the videos are also not flesh and blood humans, but chatbots, who give the impression of an active userbase. You can see why I made a similar assumption about skaiagirlsgames.</p><p class="rose">Oh.<br/>
Telling a stranger potentially identifying information, of a sexual nature? I’m violating the rules of Internet Safety 101. In my defense, you felt trustworthy somehow. 
Just in case you are a predator, ignore my last message.</p><p class="kanaya">Although I Realize This Message May Read As Sinister<br/>
You Have Nothing To Fear From Me</p><p class="rose">I believe you. And I suppose you couldn’t identify *me* from such information, even if you found the particular puppet porn site. But you might identify my friend.</p><p class="kanaya">If It Will Help You Feel More At Ease I Can Also Divulge Something Of A Similar Nature About My Friends<br/>
Hmm<br/>
Although None Of Them Have A Concupiscent Interest In Inanimate Creatures Made Of Felt I Think One Of Them Might Have A Thing For Robots<br/>
I Cannot Be Certain Because I Dont Talk To Him Often And Even If I Did I Would Avoid Such Topics Entirely<br/>
But A Mutual Friend Delivered That Tidbit Of Gossip To Me<br/>
I Dont Think He Films Any Of It But He Does Like To Build Robots So He Could Customize Them However He Wishes<br/>
Uggh Suddenly I Dont Want To Think About This Anymore</p><p class="rose">May I offer us a pathway out of this terrible conversation? And let’s ignore that I was the one who led us into it.<br/>
What brings you to this website?</p><p class="kanaya">I Am A Home Seamstress<br/>
And Not Just On The Echeladder If You Check My Page You Can See That I Am A Kittenheeled Conqueror<br/>
Conqueror Of What Im Uncertain<br/>
But I Actually Have A Sewing Machine And Frequently Use It With The Goal Of Stitching Fabrics Together To Create Garments That I Wear<br/>
My Friends Arent Much Interested In Fashion However So I Cant Really Talk To Them About It<br/>
In Any Case I Use This Website To Get Inspiration And Record Outfit Ideas I Suppose</p><p class="rose">That’s nice to hear. I don't have much experience making my own clothes, but I enjoy knitting. I look forward to reaching the Needle Mistress tier.<br/>
I only picked up this hobby recently after receiving knitting supplies from a friend. (Not the same friend with connections to puppets.) It has been unexpectedly...nice. Sometimes I underestimate this friend of mine, but he might understand me better than I understand him. </p><p class="kanaya">It Sounds Like<br/>
You Have A Special Connection</p><p class="rose">What? No. I am changing the topic again, if you please.<br/>
Any particular reason why you Type Like This?</p><p class="kanaya">It Is Simply My Typing Quirk<br/>
But Ah<br/>
I Suppose The True Answer To Your Question Is Something I Cannot Reveal As Of Now<br/>
Or Ever<br/>
And By Making It Sound So Mysterious I Have Only Piqued Your Interest More<br/>
Yet Instead Of Deleting What I Just Wrote I Am Choosing To Deliver This Message Of Mystery To Your Inbox Because<br/>
Well<br/>
I Wish For Your Interest In Me To Continue</p><p class="rose">Under normal circumstances, I would find that silly. But I admit:<br/>
Your gambit has worked.</p>
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